Here’s an interesting use of technology. Kimberly Nixon and her husband rigged up a very special cat door for their two cats Gus and Penny. Apparently the neighborhood cats were helping themselves to Gus and Penny’s food, so Kimberly’s husband, a programmer who likes to build stuff, created a cat door with an RFID reader. Each cat has an RFID tag on its collar. When the cat gets close to the door, the reader reads the tag and opens the door. This keeps the neighborhood cats out of the food. Then, to keep track of Gus and Penny’s whereabouts, the whole contraption is connected to an old laptop which has software installed that snaps a photo of the cat entering or exiting the door (see images above) and then posts a message along with the picture to Twitter. Brilliant!

WOW! I was just telling my husband yesterday (after our getting up and sitting down session with our cats) that we needed something like this. I am definitely going to be one of the first in line to get one of these!

Freaking BRILLIANT – I’ve tried and tried to think how to accomplish this! Many people with multiple cats need something like this to give Cat A access to the diabetic food and keep Cat B (with kidney problems) out of that same food.

That’s fantastic! My sweetie is just suggesting that they do something with GPS maybe to twitter their whereabouts more thoroughly I bet those kitties are very proud that only they are special enough to get inside.

@Jana:
If your cats have been radio tagged at the vet, you can just reuse those tags. I’m not sure if those are RFID specifically, but if you can build an RFID scanner, you can build whatever’s needed to be able to pick up and identify your cats tags.
@Kim & Gus:
Are you guys using your own rfid tags, or were the cat’s chipped already with a service?